Things we would have done while having in-person classes have had to be adapted in order to flow with online learning. That is especially true with conferences. Now that CHS students, parents, and teachers have experienced conferences online, how did they go? 

“I think the fact that people didn’t need to come in, they could just do it from their homes, so it takes 20 minutes to do conferences, rather than come to the school for two hours in the evening after work made more people attend,” said Principal Mairi Scott-Agurrie. 

Scott-Agurrie explains that this year about 25% of students and families, on average, attended conferences as opposed to the usual 10-15% that they have seen in some year’s past. 

Sophomore Danikka Brown said, “It was a bit difficult to figure out how to get in the Zoom meeting because the instructions were a little confusing. I liked how it was pretty fast and didn’t take long. I didn’t like how I couldn’t get personal comments from my other teachers besides my Advisory teacher.” 

Some students may have forgotten to sign-up, found the process too confusing to set up their conference, or just simply didn’t feel like going. For whatever reason students decided to attend or not to attend conferences, that still leaves room for improvement for the next time we have parent-teacher conferences. So what’s next? 

Doing things like conferences is something the school believes is important to do in order to keep families involved in their child’s education. Even then there was still confusion for some students and their families on how to sign up or where to go for their conferences. The school is planning on taking a look at the sign-up system and how easy or hard it was for families to use. 

Scott-Agurrie said, “It seemed to work ok, but then I’ve had at least one family tell me that there was some confusion [with signing-up].”

Though it is still early and there is not much information on conferences yet, Scott-Agurrie said that she planning on continuing the student-led aspect to conferences and she also wants to create more time for senior students and parents to talk with teachers because parents are having questions about FAFSA, college admissions, and other things that are also very important to help families with. 

“The structure of the ‘Cafe’ with the kinds of questions that we were asking… reviewing goals and all that…. We can facilitate those kinds of discussions that are more specific to grade levels as we’re able to teach teachers more,” said Scott-Agurrie on other additions to conferences. 

One  interesting thing Scott-Agurrie mentioned they might do (once we are able to return to in-person learning) is having Zoom meetings be a permanent part of conferences in order to make them more accessible for families who are not able to go in-person.